this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, it can be really helpful to understand the context and the problems they were trying to solve.

Like for example, I think a lot of pop-sci talk about Special/General Relativity is missing huge chunks of context, because in reality, Einstein didn't come up with these theories out of thin air. His breakthrough was creating a coherent framework out of decades of theoretical and experimental work from the scientists that came before him.

And the Einstein Field Equations really didn't answer much on their own, they just posed more questions. It wasn't until people started to find concrete solutions for them that we really understood just how powerful they were.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

GR is fascinating, because it's something you actually can spend a long, long time completely failing to observe.

Basically until you either try to understand galaxies, or you've got a pesky drift issue with your satellites, you don't need to think about it much at all. Well I suppose if you want to understand why gravity is sometimes weird but you can just ignore that for a really long time.